The table above lists the annual U.S. News & World Report rankings for national universities and national liberal-arts colleges. Since first ranking colleges in
1983, the magazine has expanded and changed its rankings several times. Included here are institutions that were, at some point, ranked in the top 50 in those two
categories. Some values are blank because in those years the magazine did not give individual rankings to every institution, instead listing them in large groups
described as "quartiles" or "tiers." The rankings shown for 1983 and 1985 are the ones that U.S. News published in its magazine in those same years. For all
subsequent years, the rankings come from U.S. News's separate annual publication "America's Best Colleges", which applies rankings for the upcoming year.